Terry E. Moffitt, Nigel Dickson, and others followed a cohort of 1,000 children from birth to the age of 32 and they found that childhood self-control predicts physical health, substance dependence, personal finances, and criminal outcomes.

They also said that effects of children’s self-control could be disengaged from their intelligence, social class and from adolescence mistakes

Another cohort of 500 sibling-pairs, the sibling with lower self-control had poorer outcomes than his brother, despite shared family background.

That study, entitled “A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety“, has been carried out by investigators of the Departments of Psychology and Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, Duke University, Durham; The Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, United Kingdom; Department of Oral Sciences and Orthodontics, School of Dentistry, University of Otago, New Zealand; Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, and Department of Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.